Monitoring Temperature and Humidity for Food Production in a Commercial Bakery

5/20/2019

Challenge

A commercial bakery needed helping addressing temperature and humidity levels in its workstations and ingredient storage area. Certain processes in the bakery’s daily production are extremely sensitive to temperature and humidity levels. Frosting quality is particularly dependent on consistent control during each process step. Without proper monitoring, the environmental changes were causing slumping and running of the frosting.

One option was adding PLC I/O, but the associated wiring is an expensive process—outside electricians need to be brought in and knowledge of the existing control system is necessary. Instead of this option, a preferred system would be battery-powered, wireless and have the ability to easily add additional measurement zones without having to shut down lines for updates.

The bakery was also already utilizing the Ignition SCADA platform through Inductive Automation to bring in data. So the environmental monitoring solution would ideally be compatible with Ignition in order to be cost effective.

Solution

To solve monitoring of humidity and temperature issues in a cost-effective manner—and avoiding process downtime—the customer selected the Wzzard Wireless Sensing Solution from B+B SmartWorx. The Wzzard Wireless sensor network was a perfect fit for the application, but needed some custom changes to fit in with the bakery’s specific needs. B+B Smartworx was able to custom mold a cable with an existing sensor for industrial temperature and humidity monitoring.Even without an existing off-the-shelf solution, the B+B SmartWorx engineering team was able to quickly provide a customized solution to the commercial bakery. The close collaboration with B+B ecosystem partners provided an Ignition solution out of the box, with no additional software or learning curve. The IP67 rating on the Wzzard Industrial enclosure allowed the device to be mounted anywhere in the bakery’s dusty environment.The Wzzard nodes can be installed anywhere within sight of each other without power or data cabling, allowing installation at each step in the production line without interruption. Direct support for Ignition allowed tags to be created automatically, with data showing up within minutes.